


Blow and Burn Slowly

by PositivelyVexed



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Broken Bones, Hurt/Comfort, Loyalty, M/M, Period-Typical Racism, Presumed Dead, Racist Language, Torture, threat of castration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 00:35:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18905893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/pseuds/PositivelyVexed
Summary: Warren makes some enemies who decide to pay him a visit. They don't catch Warren, but they do get ahold of Mannix, and they intend to make some use of him.





	Blow and Burn Slowly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



To think he’d been asleep in bed, well-rested after a good lay not so long ago.

Warren slipped out of the copse of trees he’d taken cover in once he was sure it was safe. He didn’t have his hat or his gloves, and that was already fucking with him, with the snow coming down as hard and as fast as it was.

He’d held on to his gun, at least, even got off a shot or two at the men, but he was so snowblind and fireblind—orange in front of his eyes whether he opened them or closed them—he wasn’t even sure he’d hit them.

He squinted at the conflagration of what used to be his cabin.

It wasn’t that he had anything of particular value to him in there. Nothing much of sentimental value even, aside from his cavalry uniform, and he’d managed to save his coat, at least. It was really more of a spartan hunting shack he slept in while he was in the area, to save on hotel bills. But it was his own place, the only one he’d ever owned, and he’d built it himself. Watching it burn sent a kind of ancient, bone-deep rage through him. Especially at the hands of a bunch of dumbasses like the Dalton gang.

He looked around the field. Where the hell had Mannix got himself to in all of this?

“White boy,” he said into the wind. He remembered the moments before the place had gone up in flames. Both of them stumbling out of bed, ducking to the floor as gunfire erupted. It had been chaos after that. Warren’d lived through fire before, unlike all those white men on both sides, because he knew how to get the fuck out. So he’d fled. Except that when he’d run out the back, Mannix wasn’t behind him. That'd made him pause, even turn, like a goddamn idiot, but Mannix wasn’t there. Smoke was choking him, and there was no time to figure out if Mannix had made it out the front door, so he turned and run. He’d made it to the treeline. Hadn’t seen much of anything in the dark and confusion, and had only heard indistinct voices yelling for him. By the time his disorientation passed, he’d realized he was alone.

“Mannix,” he raised his voice. Not quite to the level of a yell. Like hell was he going to stand in the snow shouting for Mannix.

He circled the cabin, now a skeletal frame and not much else. The Daltons had just ridden off, even though Warren knew it was him they were looking for.  They must have known they hadn’t killed him if they were smart enough to see the tracks leading into the trees where they grew so close the snow didn't cover the ground. Maybe they’d grabbed Mannix, decided he was enough. The Dalton boys weren’t known for their tracking. Their patience neither.

“Chris Mannix!” He was getting pissed now, and he replayed the voices he’d heard over the roar of the fire, while he’d been in the trees. He found a splash of blood in the snow, and that gave his stomach a turn. Most likely conclusion, they’d injured Chris and taken him. Decided that Chris was good enough for their ends of revenge. And well, they had wanted revenge on Chris too, hadn’t they?

He looked at the cabin. It was a bitter reminder, that nothing Warren ever acquired seemed beyond the reach of white dumbasses to take it away in an instant. As he stood in the snow, he kept staring at that blood in the snow. Everything that was his.

The Dalton boys were bounty hunters, of a sort. The kind of scavengers John Ruth would have well and truly gotten his mustache in a twist over. Men who never much bothered with the work of tracking and killing their own bounties, not when it was easier to just wait around for a real bounty hunter to do the hard work and shoot him in the back right outside of town and claim the bounty for themselves. Men like them were the reason it had rankled him, back in John Ruth’s stagecoach, being accused of wanting to steal his bounty. Not that Warren regarded himself above any level of trickery and treachery, but he always did his own killing, as a matter of professional pride.

Well. The fuckers had done their own hunting for once. It would just be to their everlasting sorrow that they’d tried it on him.

He waded through the snow to the stables, which were far enough away that there was no risk of the fire spreading there. Inside were Warren’s horse and Mannix’s, both skittish and whinnying but unharmed.

He found a hat in the stable, but he was shit out of luck on the glove front, so he guessed he’d just have to bear it as he mounted up his horse. Two guns, not enough bullets, cold hands. Well, shit. He’d been in worse spots.

It wasn’t going to stop him from getting back what was his.

 

* * *

 

It’d started out as an ordinary night, by some measures.

Warren didn’t think he’d ever be used to Mannix lounging around his place, in his bed. It was strange enough, fucking him, but sitting down to a dinner that they had fixed together was a whole order of magnitude stranger.

“Now, these bodies we’re after that you buried… why couldn’t you just bring them in?” asked Mannix, like he wasn’t having the time of his life getting away from Red Rock and craning his neck every which way around Warren's cabin, like it was some fine hotel he was in.

“Because I knew the Dalton brothers were after them, and like hell was I going to juggle three dead bandits and deal with them at the same time.”

“So you buried them before or after you shot Jeb Dalton in the face?”

“Before.” He raised his eyebrows at Mannix, then decided he'd humor Mannix and ask what Mannix was so clearly hoping he'd ask. “And how'd you know about Jeb Dalton?”

Mannix grinned, leaned in on his elbows. “They weren’t too happy with you about that. Came in to my office. Thought I should do something, as the sheriff, about you cutting down their eldest in cold blood.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You been here to arrest me this whole time, Chris Mannix?”

“No sir, major sir,” Chris said, stretching like a cat. “They weren’t too happy when I laughed in their face. But I’d watch your back in the future. I think they might come back for you.”

Warren raised his eyebrows at him. “You believed me over a white man when it came to a white man I definitely shot? How do you know you ain’t letting me get away with murder?”

Chris shivered, looked uncomfortable. “You and I both know I’m letting you get away with murder just by letting you live. But as to this particular? I don't believe I'm letting you getting away with anything this time. Least not anything illegal. Everyone knows what the Dalton brothers do. Old John Price, he runs the General Store over on First, he's the one whose daughter is sweethearts with my deputy—”

“—This going somewhere?”

“—I’m getting to the point, you impatient bastard. He overheard them talking about it, the whole plan—you going out after the DeGrazia boys, and you’d probably go through Flat Wash Canyon with them on the sled, and they was going to find you before you got out.”

“So you cracked the case because someone else overheard the whole plan and told you about it. That’s some fine detective work, Chris.”

“I saw through your scheme, too, remember major, so maybe don’t get so high and mighty about it.”

Warren snorted, amused in spite of himself.

“So, anyway, as I was saying,” Chris said, swooping around the point like carrion. “The second-youngest, Eli or Elijah or Ezekiel or some other Old Testament shit like that, comes in with a story for me about how this black bastard, name of Marquis Warren, killed their own brother in cold blood, and I’m thinking, now, considering everything I ever heard tell about the Dalton boys, and what I overheard from John it sounds like it wasn’t in such cold blood. So I say tht _if_ the Major killed one of them, which, given what everyone knows about Major Warren, I’ll concede sounds likely, there won’t be any way to prove it weren’t in self-defense, what with John Price being ready and willing to testify to overhearing them conspiring to put that same black major in the ground, and if it comes to it in court, there’s a lot of unanswered questions about that dead bounty hunter, Amos Rollins, who turned up dead in a creek last summer, just around the same time they turned in the same bounty he was out hunting after. Now, I say to him, that seems awful suspicious to me, and he’d better think real carefully about what he wanted stir up, because it might not break in their favor.”

Mannix grinned at him, and Warren could just about imagine him doing the same to Eli or whatever his name was, so damn proud of himself for working all that out. Warren couldn’t even say he hated it himself. A sheriff who had his back, who poked holes in the stories of bastards wanted him dead before Warren even got wind of it. There was something to be said for it. Especially how he got down on his knees for Warren at the end of the day.

Of course, Mannix was incapable of not overplaying his hand.

“Now, not that we’re keeping score, but some might call that saving your life again. Another man might have just taken any old excuse to get rid of you—”

“Another man who doesn’t like getting fucked up the ass by me, you mean.”

“Now that’s just exactly the kind of ungrateful attitude that would put most men off saving you, major. And after I agreed to help you collect these bodies anyway. You know there ain’t anything in it for me, going up and following you into the hills to freeze my ass off looking for some gang you buried—”

“Nothing in it for you, is there? Well, alright then. Good night, Chris.”

Mannix looked anxious, like he thought he could see the specter of a blowjob turning to smoke right then and there. Like he was afraid that Warren hadn’t asked him up here for anything but help unburying and verifying the bodies. Like they were going to be nothing but professional with each other for once in their fucked-up acquaintance.

“Now Major, don’t be like that,” he said. “You got those nice twenty-thousand dollar bounties waiting for you up in the snow, and we don’t have to worry about anyone overhearing us, all the way out here. Not like back in town.”

“You’re the one worried about folks overhearing us back in town. I ain’t scared to shoot a man wants to start trouble over how I like to fuck.”

Mannix looked like he didn't know whether to look skeptical or get wood right then and there. “We’ve drifted pretty far afield of the point. All I was trying to say was to keep your eyes open, because I think those bastards may come for you for revenge, now that they realized they ain’t getting it from me.”

Warren snorted. “I appreciate your concern. But if you’re worried about anything, I think it’s that word’s going to get around that you sided with Major Warren over a white man, on a white man’s death, and you’re feeling kind of funny about that, and not sure how to take it.”

Mannix scowled. “That ain’t close to the worst thing I’ve done with you lately.”

“Keep sweet-talking me Mannix, you’re gonna have me blushing soon.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t like it. Me siding with you over them. And me getting found out about it. About all of this too. You’d fuck me in front of all of Red Rock, and then let them drag me off to the gallows to hang. That’d just be the cherry on top for you, wouldn’t it?”

Warren shrugged. “Sure, suppose it would. It sure ain’t what I’d hang you for, but it’s still the right way for you to go, it comes to it.”

Mannix looked at him. “Now tell me how we got to the point where I’m here helping you move bodies and covering for you, and you’re still treating me like dirt you scraped off your heels.”

“I don’t know, Chris. You’re welcome to leave, though, it doesn’t suit you.”

Chris frowned. Stood, took a few uneasy steps towards the door, then turned and stepped back to Warren.

“Admit it, you did kill that fucker in self-defense, didn’t you? Because they were fixing to steal those bodies off of you, and you don’t want to say it to me because then you’d have to admit I can piece together evidence well enough to see when you’re a murdering liar, _and_ when you’re not.”

Looking awfully sure of himself, he walked over to the major and sat in his lap. Slipped one hand down his pants and casually stroked him.

Warren didn't give him the satisfaction of agreeing, but he supposed his silence said enough on that score. So did the way he raised his hips, ground his cock up against Mannix's. Mannix looked smug, too smug, so he let him beg for a while, until there was no doubt in either of their minds how desperately Mannix wanted it, then he bent him over the bed.

They’d been fucking for a while, but Warren had a sense of propriety about things, knew when to keep his life and Chris Mannix separate, so he usually only fucked Mannix in Mannix’s own little sheriff’s house, with the rickety, rocking bed that Mannix never fixed no matter how many times he moaned about the noise they were making. If Mannix did that, then he might have to admit to himself he expected Warren to be back rocking his bed the next time. Mannix was still in denial about how bad he wanted it, and would usually try to force the matter to violence. The violence suited Warren just fine, but not Chris Mannix maintaining his denial about whether he had a choice.

Mannix was more shameless tonight, maybe because Warren had invited him into his house, and he thought that made him special, was some kind of concession that Warren cared one way or another about him. When Warren just needed a sheriff, to come up into the mountains with him, to hunt down those bodies he had stashed under the snow near an old mining outfit that had long since collapsed in on itself.

So he hit Mannix extra hard tonight, and didn’t do jack shit to get him off, even though Mannix moaned and begged for it. Just fucked him while holding his hands above his head, so Chris couldn’t even get himself off, then smacked his ass and thighs red. Mannix came from that, right on his damn sheets. He supposed a man with tastes as perverse as Mannix’s, it was an open question whether it was possible for Warren to deny him properly. Not with the perverse directions Warren’s own tastes ran in.

“I shot Jeb Dalton when he he drew on me, coming through Flat Wash Canyon.”

“I knew it,” Mannix said.

They went to bed soon after. That had been all Warren thought he had to worry about, Mannix being smug and thinking he knew him better than he did. Then he had woke to shooting, and the fire.

 

* * *

 

Long before the ashes even cooled, Warren urged his horse in the direction of the little rundown farm up in the mountains he’d long known was the hideout of the Dalton gang-cum-bounty hunters. He felt a kind of cold rage stewing in his veins, and he didn’t know how he’d come to this. He was, in a sense, delivering himself right to them, the sort of foolishness he’d always thought deserved its own bullet in the brain.

It wasn’t that he cared about Mannix, one way or another. It wasn’t that Mannix didn’t deserve a painful death. But for good or ill, Mannix was his, and he didn’t like it when people took things that were his. Warren’d never had any possession in his whole life that he hadn’t had to fight and lie and kill for. (Though, come to think of it, he’d never lied for Mannix. Mannix knew the rotten heart of him from the beginning.) He thought he’d done his share of fighting and killing when they met, enough to pay the bill plus change, but he guessed two men like him, they ran up a new tab every now and then. Had to be paid out in fresh blood.

The Daltons didn’t seem the type to think through the implications of kidnapping a sheriff, what kind of hell that could bring down on them. Kidnapping Mannix’s sworn-in, white trash ass would bring a passel of trouble on their heads that killing an old black bounty hunter in cold blood wouldn’t begin to compare with. But he guessed that once they had him, then they’d think it through and realize the best thing to do would be to ensure Mannix was never found.

The reasonable thing to do, Warren decided, might have been to fuck off. Let them have Mannix. Let Mannix tell everything he had tell about where those bodies were buried, then wait for them there, where he’d have the upper hand and the element of surprise. Kill them all, and never deal with them again.

Instead, for reasons he couldn't quite fathom, and preferred not to examine, he was making the Daltons’ day and bringing himself right to them.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Chris shifted. He was cold.

He'd crawled for the front door once the fire’d started, thinking Major Warren was right behind him. It took till he was about at the door before hearing the Daltons out in front, realizing just what kind of fire it was. The smart thing to do would be to sneak out the back, like Warren’d surely already done. But the smoke was choking him, and the place had caught like kindling, and the roof was already making cracking sounds. Shit. No way out but the front.

He stumbled out into the winter air, and something hit him on the head on the way out the door. He landed on his hands and knees in the snow. He tried to stand, swayed a second, the world spinning more than it should, and he noticed the ground hurtling towards him.

When he came to, he was on the back of a horse, and he could feel his hands tied behind him, a burlap sack over his head. He opened his mouth to speak, but then licked his lips. For all that Major Warren didn’t seem to think he was capable of keeping his mouth closed, he knew when to stay silent and listen.

“Jesus Christ, Joe, what were you thinking? You know, the odds of him even knowing where the bodies are ain’t good. Why couldn’t you have fucking brought back the nigger soldier, like I told you to?”

“Ain’t my fault we lost him. My guess is he burned up inside. Besides, even if he don’t know, I got designs on the sheriff of Red Rock, for Jeb.”

It was, he decided, some kind of half-assed ploy to get him to talk, by making him think the Major was dead. That’s what this bullshit was. He didn’t believe it. All the same, he’d take pleasure in killing them. Then he passed out again.

When he woke, he was still on the back of the horse, and no one was saying anything, so Chris tried to bear the silence for a while until he couldn't stand it anymore and said, “Eli Dalton, what the fuck do you think you're doing?”

He got nothing back. He licked his lips, tried to pay it cool, but cool was dribbling out of him between the throbbing headache and the bag over his head and….

“Did I hear you assholes saying you think you killed Major Warren?” Tried to sounds more casual than he felt.

This time he got an answer. “Think? We did. You’re the only one made it out of that shack, more’s the pity.”

“I find that hard to believe."

“Believe what you want, so long as you tell us where those bodies are buried. It's the least we deserve after that bastard killed our brother.”

Chris licked his lips, hoping he'd pass out and this whole thing would  be just a dream. “I don't think I feel so talkative just now.”

“Oh, you will soon enough. Here we are, home sweet home. String him up over in the barn, Zeke.”

Mannix was manhandled off the saddle, then decided he was through with being compliant. He got his feet under him, and head-butted the closest one, because fuck these bastards if they thought he was going to come quietly. He needed them to know that even with his hands tied behind his back he could make them hurt—and the Major could fight even better than him, so like fuck had some jackass with a soft potbelly and skinny arms taken out a man none of the best men in Mannix’s neck of the woods had been able to take down. Like hell had the Major died in a fucking fire. 

He broke the fellow’s nose with his head-butt, and went back for another run, but he was hit on the head again, and went down on his knees.

“Now, what you got to remember, sheriff, and take into account to form a full and complete picture of the situation, is that this ain’t strictly a matter of pragmatism. This is a matter of pure, plain, vengeance. So you're gonna die either way. But you get to decide how much suffering you do along the way, depending on how quick you tell us what your nigger friend say about where the DeGrazias are."

“It’s to my great pleasure that he didn’t say shit to me about where the bodies were buried,” Chris lied. “So you’re shit out of luck there. You ain’t ever finding those bodies. And you don’t know the major at all if you think he’d just go and tell a white man like me where he hid them.”

“Based on everything I heard, sounds like there’s no man in the wide world he’d have been more likely to tell than you. Funny couple you make. I didn’t believe it myself, but to find out you two were bedding down together—”

Chris felt a fresh spike of hate wash over him. He thought it was showing a bit, blinding him, making him for-real stupid, but he wasn’t sure any of that mattered now. Nothing seemed to matter with the Major wiped off the earth. He felt a funny tightness in his chest that made it hard to breath.

“Now, sheriff. Be reasonable. How do you think this is going to end?”

He blinked, uncomprehending, for a moment. Someone was speaking to him, seemed to be dragging his attention from the Major to things that didn’t seem to matter so much. He’d felt aimless for a while there, with the major, all his usual targets of hate kind of stripped away by force, leaving him spinning like a compass didn’t know which way was north. But suddenly, it all seemed very simple. 

He blinked, and caught up. Got his back up. “I know how this is going to end. You just told me I was dead, dumbass. Not much incentive for me to help you bastards.”

“Yeah, I can see how you might feel that way. But what you got to consider is how much suffering a man can do before he dies.”

“Oh, I already know that, fucker, believe me,” Chris said.

“We’ll just take that as an invitation then. Get him in the barn, Zeke.”

 

* * *

 

It had been a long time since Warren’d had to navigate by starlight alone, no compass or roads or even a lantern to see by. But he held true to the trail.

His hands were fucking freezing. Maggie was a good girl, who knew her way even with minimal tugging on the reins, but even so, his hands were getting fucked up by exposure to the wind and snow. He couldn’t shove them into his coat as well as hold the reins, so he shivered, and switched off between hands.

Smart thing to do would have been to make the shorter ride to Red Rock, get himself enough ammunition and cold weather gear, even encouraged a posse of men to take their sheriff back, assuming enough of them cared.

Warren could have done that. He couldn’t say why that seemed unacceptably slow and impersonal.

He was putting a lot of work into not thinking too hard about what Mannix was doing in all of this. Mannix had sided with him once, when he’d decided it wasn’t in his benefit to work with a lying bitch who would have gladly let him drink poison. Warren didn’t want to think too hard about what circumstances might make him choose differently. Mannix had some steel in him, he had to admit, and enough brains to know that men like the Daltons were even less trustworthy that a bitch like Daisy Domergue had been, but white men, in his considerable experience, weren’t used to real hurt, didn’t know how easily they could be broken until they were.

He told himself if Mannix betrayed him, decided to work with them to save his hide, it wasn’t any skin off Warren's nose. Just one more white boy in need of killing, and since he was, by any objective standards, all of that already, maybe it’d even straighten Warren's life out some, simplify things, and if that gave him a sick twist to his stomach to think on that rivaled the cold ache in his body, well, that was his own fault for letting himself get used to having Mannix on his knees for him.

He urged his horse on into the darkness. His hands still hurt, which he took as a good sign, showed they weren’t too far gone.

 

* * *

 

They knocked Chris to his knees, no small thing with his hands still tied behind him. One of the men put a boot between his shoulder blades and pushed him onto his stomach, and Chris went down, getting his chin bruised and scraped raw on the floorboards in the process.

“How many more fingers you want us to break?”

“By my count, I only got one left on this hand,” Chris said, voice tight and curdled. For the past however-long, Joe Dalton, shortest and ugliest of the Daltons and definitely the meanest, probably on account of the first two things, had been entertaining himself by snapping Chris’s fingers like breadsticks. It seemed to Chris that the repetition should have at least offered some merciful element of diminishing returns. Like the second and the third should have not hurt as much as the first, and not meant as much, since Joe’d broken his trigger finger first. But he guessed he wasn’t even as lucky as all that. Each injury to each new finger seemed to build off the hurt of the last one. He thought numbness should have claimed his whole hand by now, especially with how tight the ropes were around his wrists, but it was all fire shooting down each individual finger, and Joe seemed to like twisting around the broken fingers in his hand until he couldn't hold back a yell.

Chris knew the kind of men who liked to hear a man scream. He’d been one of them, once or twice, when he'd been real pissed. Not all the time, though, not like some of the men his Daddy’d run with. He knew the intoxication that ran through a man when he wielded that kind of power. It made up for all lack of power in other areas, Chris knew from experience. He guessed the major would have said it was Chris knowing, and how he knew, that made him deserve every last ounce of it. And maybe, sometimes, when he was having the worst of the nightmares, he wondered if there wasn’t something to that, even if he swore in his waking hours he didn’t regret nothing.  

Chris thought he’d been on the receiving end of ugly shit too, but he was starting to realize he hadn’t had a clue. Major Warren would have told him that with relish in his voice, if he were here. But he wasn't. Somehow that was the worst of it. Worse even than Chris knowing he was gonna die.

He felt Joe’s hands, clammy as raw sausages, wrap around his little finger, and somehow the touch itself was so repellent it added insult to injury. His pinky was bent back, slow, so Chris had plenty of time to feel the pressure build and the queasiness pool in his stomach before the snap went through his hand. Joe squeezed Chris’s whole hand, broken and throbbing, and Chris thought about killing each and every one of these bastards slowly with fire, a little memento of how the Major had gone. The trouble was, he didn’t have any clear idea to get himself from here to that fantasy version of himself, and he was getting farther by the second.

“You think we’re in danger of killing him before he spills?” Eli or Elijah said. He and Joe were the ones in charge, here. The third, Zeke, who hadn’t said a word, stood in the corner, well-armed, watching.

“Think if we do, we’ll be hailed as heroes,” said Joe.

“What is it about Joes? Why are all of you such goddamn ugly miserable sons of bitches?” asked Chris.

He was seized by the hair and his face slammed into the floor. Broken noses hurt like a motherfucker. When he could breath again, he lifted his head, tried to sounds reasonable.

“Killing me ain’t like killing another bounty hunter, you know,” he said, tasting blood in his mouth. “You’ll be killing one of the law’s own. Major Warren maybe won’t be missed for a while, but I will, and you’ll bring down a whole assload of retribution down your heads. I don’t think any of you fellas are good enough shots that you’re going to win in a firefight with US Marshals. ”

“Firefight with US Marshals,” repeated Joe, a warm chuckle in his voice. “Someone thinks highly of himself. The man who had your job before this was murdered, and if Lance Lawson hadn’t been drunk off his ass and bragging around town about how he shot him, he would have got away clean. They certainly didn’t call up any US Marshals.”

Chris got quieter, softer-voiced, ignoring the blood running silently from his nose into his mouth. Since he’d become sheriff, he was better at reasoning with criminals than most folks would have given him credit for. Probably because he thought like them. “You’re missing the crucial difference, which is that Lance Lawson didn’t make his living turning in bounties to every sheriff in Wyoming. And folks in Red Rock know you ain’t happy with me, on account of Jeb, so you’ll be the first people they suspect. Awful lot of chances for some sheriff who knows, or guesses, what you done to the sheriff of Red Rock to take matters into his own hands. Or, you  could let me go."

"That's a laugh."

"Is you living to continue your dubious career a laugh too? I’ll let you boys go free. Real quid pro quo. Forget this whole thing ever happened. Now don’t that sound easier to you than standing out here freezing your asses off in a barn in the middle of the night?”

Chris licked his lips, dipped into the parts of himself that were never buried too far beneath the surface, even though he sometimes felt differently about them now, like maybe they were as rotten and full of dogshit as Major Warren always said they were. “Now, the Major and I had something resembling a working partnership, it’s true, but that was because I’m a pragmatic man, and I can work with even the most jumped-up kill-crazy bastard, it suits me. That don’t mean I got any great love for them. I’m willing to overlook one mean dead nigger no one’s going to mind losing anyhow. I want to live.”

Chris tried to look hard and ready for a deal. Like he really wanted nothing more than to get out of this alive, by any means necessary, even by cutting a deal with the men who’d just broken his fingers. Playing dumb and open-faced had gotten Chris pretty far in life, considering, but he wasn’t sure he could play friendly right now, when he felt like fury was about to tear him apart from the inside out. He kept his eyes cool and unblinking. Hoped none of that showed on his face.

 

Eli was looking worried, he thought. Hadn’t thought through the full implications of killing the sheriff, most like. But Joe was shaking his head. “I think you’re a full-of-shit cocksucker. I think we broke your goddamn heart when we killed that nigger, whether you can face it or not, and you’re looking for a chance to get the upper hand, so you want us to think you can play nice. But you can’t play nice, can you, Chris?”

He grabbed Chris by the hair. Chris started talking fast, “You think I ain’t told my deputies about you? You think you won’t be the first gang they suspect when I never turn up? You think you can get away with turning those bounties in anywhere without alerting—“

“Jesus Christ, shut him up. I can’t stand to hear that asshole talk anymore.”

“I notice that ain’t a response to the point—“

Pain exploded up and down his side. He was fairly certain the punch had broken some ribs. Chris went away from himself for a while, and drifted in a daze of pain and explosions of color behind his eyes. When he was able to open his eyes again, he was on the ground, and he saw one of them coming over to him with an old rag he seemed to have dug out of the corner.

Somehow, the thought of getting shut up scared Chris more than anything else did, and he began backpedaling.

“Hey, now, you don’t need to do that, I can keep my mouth shut-“

Joe seized him by the hair, balled the rag up and shoved it in his mouth. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and tied it around Chris’s mouth. Too tight to dislodge, no matter how Chris pushed his tongue out and jerked his head, so he just swallowed thickly around the gag, and glowered at them. He thought he could taste every last swipe over the floors and walls that rag had ever had, and it filled his nose, making his eyes water and his throat close.

“There, that’s better. Let’s keep you silenced for a while, see if you have anything more worthwhile to say when you can open that mouth again. Now, where were we?”

He found Chris’s pinky, already swollen up like a bee sting, jerked it backwards again. Chris’s cries were swallowed up in the gag.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It was a few hours before dawn, and it took a few false starts and wrong turns before Warren was sure he was on the right trail. The delays had put him in an even pissier mood, and he was almost frozen solid. If he’d been a different sort of man, the throb in his fingers or his horse slipping on the ice-slicked stones, nearly losing her footing, would have made him say fuck it, go back to Red Rock and recuperate before he went after the Daltons. But when he set his mind to something, he did it. Mannix kept recurring through his mind when he thought about revenge, no matter how hard he tried to push the images of him out of his mind. He shouldn’t have cared—if someone else spared him the trouble of killing him, it should have been a relief. The trouble was, dead white men came easy, for Warren. White men who got on their knees for him were rarer, but not unheard of. It was the problem of losing someone who offered up his ass freely, to be beaten or fucked or anything else Warren cared to do to it, who fell asleep with his cock in his mouth some nights, who walked around with welts on his thighs, who let Warren loop his scarf around Mannix’s neck, and follow where Warren led him. Who moaned and came just from Warren whispering in his ears and pinching and slapping his nipples till they stood up on end, cock twitching untouched with need—all that was a damn sight rarer, and Warren’d let himself get used to it. Chris Mannix had become an entertainment and a luxury, and then Warren’d just somehow let him become a fixture.

Worse, though, harder to justify or quantify, were the times Mannix’d looked at him long, and Warren’d almost looked back. Worse was how he got that appreciative look in his eye, when Warren told him how he’d stalked some particularly hapless human quarry, and how he rubbed his hands over Warren’s gunshot leg, on the inner thigh, when it ached fiercely on cold nights. He’d let himself get used to all the shit that came with the fucking too, and he’d opened himself up to something he hadn’t meant to. He pushed the thoughts aside, not liking how weak the whole thing made him feel.

So instead he thought about logistics, about knives and ropes and fire. He felt on stabler ground, thinking along those lines, as long as he didn’t think about them in conjunction with Mannix. He didn’t care for fear that seemed to sit in his stomach like a stone.

Warren found the farmhouse at the end of a shallow clearing, mostly grown in with trees. He saw a couple of lanterns burning in the farmhouse, and a whole lot more burning in the barn. Way more activity in the barn than he’d expect, for a ranch where no ranching seemed to go on.

He crept closer. The place was in shameful disarray, laden with probably twenty years of old broken down furniture and crates piled in the back of the barn. The snow had drifted up high enough that he thought he could clamber up, maybe even force his way into the loft, supposing it could be forced open with a knife. So he left his mare tied up at the edge of the woods, and sidled up to the back. He scrambled up the snowdrift of junk—punctured with broken chair legs sticking up through the snow like hands clawing for the air. He scampered up the precarious hill, like he was still limber as a teenager, and more of a goddamn fool than he’d ever been at any age. If this had been a simple bounty, or a simple matter of revenge, he would have done the sensible thing and camped out in the trees, waiting to snipe them from forty feet away and with full tree cover. Walking inside when he didn’t know what was waiting for him was the kind of shit amateurs did. But shit, as long as they had something he wanted, he couldn’t go picking them off without one of them getting smart enough to threaten what he’d come for.

He slid his knife in the loft window jam, and got the latch loose as slowly and silently as he could. Lifted it just a crack to see in. It was piled with more junk and bathed in darkness and so much dust he felt confident no one had been up there in years.

It was lucky for Mannix that these boys seemed to be such a two-bit operation. He didn’t think he’d have bothered exerting himself otherwise. He pulled himself up into the loft, and got himself situated behind some long-ago rotted hay bales. From here, he was well hidden in shadows, but had a nice panoramic view of the barn below him.

He heard voices and a commotion, coming from the corner of the barn where there was a chimney, with a merrily roaring fire. Beside it, butchers block, bloody implements. All the instruments needed to take a man apart.

And there, stretched out beneath him, trussed up like a lamb for the slaughter, was Mannix.

 

 

* * *

 

Chris was drifting in and out of consciousness, trying, and mostly failing to stay in the dark, where it didn’t hurt so bad. He thought back, again, to one of the Daltons, he couldn’t remember which one, asking him how he thought this was going to end. That had been when he was still hoping he could talk himself out of the position he found himself in. Could find some way to get the upper hand and get Major Warren the vengeance he so truly deserved. He’d realized, with a kind of ugly pang, that he’d ended up just like Daisy Domergue, trying, and failing to bullshit his way out of an ugly end.

Well, fuck.

He realized, vaguely, that the men had stopped delivering kicks to his belly and broken ribs. That they were dragging him to his feet and he was expected to stand, to walk. He dragged his feet, just to be obstinate. He tried to open his eyes, but they felt almost sealed shut with swelling. He let out a huff of breath, and accidentally drew a deep breath in through his nose, that made him choke on the filthy gag in his mouth. He was slammed face-down on a table, bent at the waist, and he could feel them untying his wrists. He tensed, sensing an opportunity, but a knife appeared at his throat, digging in so hard there was no doubt it was already cutting him up. He held painfully still as they got his hands untied—right hand still throbbing.

They dragged his hands above his head, and he felt his hands getting fixed to the table with new ropes. The knife moved up to his cheek. It slid between his cheek and the rag, and then turned sideways with a flick of the wrist—he felt the knick of the blade into his cheek, and felt the handkerchief fall open out of his mouth. He spat the balled-up rag out of his mouth, and spat a few more times for good measure. He could feel something warm and moist on his cheek, where the knife had cut him.

Joe was looking down at him. “You ready to talk, or you really so fond of that dead buck and his big black cock you going to keep being stubborn?”

Chris looked at him, realized something. Maybe thinking about Daisy Domergue in the first place got him thinking about those fourteen men lying in wait in Red Rock. About all the ways a bastard could bullshit him, trying to convince Chris he held more in his hand than he did. “You sure the major's dead? Like, saw-a-body dead?”

“Come again?”

He licked his chapped lips, feeling a bit steadier, going by the look on his face. “I'm just wondering if you aren't full of shit about the Major being dead. Like, maybe you don’t know where he is, and you’re sweating because you let him get away, and you’re doing what you can with me because you don’t got as much time as you want. I’m your only ticket to that little location you so desperately want, and you’re worried you need to get it before he gets word to Red Rock what you boys done.”

Joe looked at him, smiled a rotten-toothed smile. He held up his hands. “Maybe you got me. Maybe I don’t know if he’s dead or not. But I think you need to think about what you’re proposing. You know how long you’ve been here?”

“No,” snapped Chris. “I’ve been hit in the head a bit too much to be any kind of time keeper.”

“Long enough for him to have found you, that’s how. Long enough to have brought the whole of Red Rock down on our heads if he was so inclined. Now, I think you need to consider what it means that he hasn’t.”

He twirled that knife around. “Either he’s dead in that fire, and I’m an honest man.” Chris was thinking of how Warren used to twirl a knife at him, in circumstances that weren’t so different to the uninformed observer, but were nothing like that at all, not with the way Chris would get wood from it, or the way the major grinned, traded between stroking him slow and running the knife down his sternum. If they’d met under different circumstances, there was no doubt Warren’d been capable of doing all the things Joe was doing to him. Hell, Warren’d probably consider them greenhorns, given everything Chris used to hear around the campfire about that asshole.

Joe slid that knife right up into his mouth, pressed the blade flat on his tongue. Chris held still, kept silent, tried not to balk at the taste of metal and leather against his tongue. “Or you got to consider that the Major’s got other priorities than you, and you’re getting your ass beaten to protect a treacherous old nigger who don’t give a fuck about you.” Joe pushed that knife down a little further, probably drawing blood. “Think on that.”

Joe moved the knife back to his neck, and Chris glowered. “For a man who wants me to talk so badly, you’re sure willing to gamble with accidentally cutting my tongue out of my head.”

“If anyone cuts yours tongue out of your head, it ain’t going to be on accident.”

“How you gonna get that location out of me then? You gonna make me write it out with my broken hand?” Chris snapped. It was all pointless, he was barely listening to himself. He was thinking about Major Warren. He knew what kind of man the major was. He’d known that before he’d laid eyes on him, and it didn’t much matter. This, whatever he felt for the Major, had never been predicated on anything like reciprocity. Warren could leave him, stab him in the back, if he so chose, but Chris Mannix had already broken bonds of loyalty that should have never been broken. These were the only bonds of loyalty he had left, and Chris didn’t know how to function without them. Penny-ante outlaws threatening to cut pieces out of him couldn’t hope to get at something Chris himself didn’t know how to get rid of, because he didn't know why he had it in the first place. Chris had room in himself for loyalty and hate, and though Major Warren proved those things could switch around a little too easily in Chris’s head, he knew they weren't going to budge again where the Major was concerned, and it certainly wouldn’t be Joe Dalton’s doing.

“I don’t know if he’s dead or not, and it don’t make a difference either way, the answer’s the same. Fuck you and fuck those bounties. I ain’t telling you shit.”  


 

* * *

 

Peering down out of the loft, Warren felt a funny kind of twinge to see Mannix, so close and so far, stretched out across a table, hands tied up above him, feet on the floor, shirt torn and bloody. A few days ago, Warren’d would have thought there was nothing he didn’t like about the sight of Mannix bloody and beaten, but he’d only been thinking in terms of someone like him doing the beating. Turns out it was possible for him to hate the sight. Three men surrounded him, the two doing the active torturing, and the third, who somehow worried him the most, since he was armed, and out of Warren's range, and aiming his gun at Mannix, as if Mannix could have got free from his current position.

The smallest Dalton, Joe, had a knife pressed in Chris’s mouth. Held there, like he was some kind of doctor holding his tongue down with a spatula. A damn fool surge of possessive rage washed through him, and Warren bit down on it. He couldn’t afford to be this much of a dumbass about Mannix.

The knife was removed from Chris's mouth, and he saw the two men exchange words. He crept closer, straining to hear, a funny kind of fear clenching his chest--hating that he cared what Mannix was saying.

Mannix looked up, and his eyes focused on Joe, and this time, there was no mistaking the hate in his eyes, or his words, which finally raised loud enough that Warren could hear them.

“I don’t know if he’s dead or not, and it don’t make a difference either way, the answer’s the same. Fuck you and fuck your bounties. I ain’t telling you shit.”

Warren felt a kind of punch in the chest, a tightness he couldn’t name. He let out a breath slowly.

The tallest Dalton, Eli, stood next to him, put his hand on his shoulder. “Sheriff. I think you’re misunderstanding what’s happening here. We're not looking to cut a deal with you. We’re going to take you apart until you tell us where the bodies are.”

“Then do it,” Chris said, shaky-voiced, sounding disgusted and more than a little dismayed at himself.

Warren considered the situation. He was firmly outnumbered at the moment, and the whole reason he’d lived as long as he had was because he didn’t do stupid shit like starting a gunfight he wasn’t sure he could win. For that matter, he was fairly sure he was still alive because he didn’t do stupid shit to stick his neck out to rescue anyone else.

“Well, sure. You got some fucked up tastes, sheriff, but I think we can help with that. Remove the problem that led you down this path.”

Mannix was going pale. “I don't know what you're talking about, but I think you better shut up.”

Warren’s hand felt slick on the trigger, but he didn’t dare pull it. Not with three of them down there, one out of range and a pistol aimed straight at Chris’s head. He had to come up with some kind of a plan, and fast. He could feel the mood turning, the way the mood of bloodthirsty men often shifted, got darker, more perverse. Warren knew plenty about that, knew well he wasn’t the only man whose cruelty took on a deviant streak as he sank down into, even men who didn’t share his proclivities. He could feel it stirring between the Daltons now, that feeling that knowing what Chris liked gave them license to take things in a direction they might otherwise have been held back from.

It was Joe that moved forward, slapped his ass, and pulled his pants down around his ankles. Chris sucked in a breath sharply, a new dimension to his fear visible in the way he tensed all his muscles.

The thought of fucking around here waiting any longer seemed suddenly intolerable. Warren scanned the loft full of junk, considering and rejecting each item, until he found a stash of glass bottles that gave off a distinct whiff of turpentine. He looked at them long and hard, and smiled.

“We’ve heard talk, sheriff. People say things.” Joe’s hands slipping briefly down between the crack of his ass, before slapping him again.

“You heard a lot of bullshit,” Chris said. Scared. As well he should be. Chris couldn’t see it, but Warren could. Eli’d been heating a knife in the hottest part of the roaring fire. He saw the tip start to glow.

“Now, gentlemen, let’s slow things down—”

The knife came out of the fire. He touched the tip of blade to the back of his thigh. Mannix jumped about a foot in the air, trying to squirm away but having nowhere to go. Joe grabbed his balls from between his legs.

Warren uncorked the bottle, pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and stuffed it in the bottle. Pulled out his book of matches. This might be a very bad idea, but he didn’t have time for a better one.

“Well, looks like we can cut these off and send them to him. He’s already got you by them, he might as well have them.”

“Wait, we can talk about this.”

“Getting more agreeable, aren’t you?” Joe raised the knife up to Chris’ balls, held it close, hot enough to singe, hot enough that he could smell burning hair. “Gonna prove how little use for balls you really have?”

Warren struck a match, lit the handkerchief, and threw the bottle toward Zeke, standing guard among bales and bales of hay. He didn't know fuck about throwing flaming bottles, but it stayed lit, and it spun in a proper arc where he wanted it to go. It landed close enough to Zeke that some of the flaming turpentine got on him. Fire leapt to him.

That was chaos enough. Zeke ran, further in the barn, as he'd hoped, and Warren shot him through the heart first, then Eli. The he took aim at Joe, and shot him in the kneecap. When Hoe went down to the floor howling, hands round his leg to grasp his ruined knee, Warren shot again, the bullet ripping through both his hands this time. He thrashed uselessly on the floor, screaming, but Warren ignored him.

In all that time, Mannix had been propping himself up on his elbows as best as he could, his head jerking around as men fell around him. He twisted his neck around as far as he could, but Warren didn’t think he could see him.

The hay fire was crackling merrily, although it was thankfully slow to spread to the structure.

Warren holstered his revolver, started coming down the ladder. Mannix was breathing heavily.

“Major,” he said. Not asking.

He didn’t answer right away. Felt a kind of pleasure stir through him, walking towards Chris in an appealing position with his pants down around his ankles and and his hands fixed up tight above his head, ass on display for Warren to do whatever he liked to it. If he’d had more time, if he hadn’t been so badly tired and hurt, and if his heart wasn’t still racing, thinking about other men touching him in ways neither of them wanted, he would have been inclined to have some fun with Chris in that position. 

Mannix very pointedly wasn’t twisting his head around trying to get a look at the man approaching him from behind. “Should have known you were too much of a mean old bastard to kill.”

He smiled to himself, reached his hand out and laid it on Chris’s back. Tried, and failed, to make his voice sound even. “Yeah, I’m disappointed in you Chris, not being able to figure that much out.”

“Well it took you so long you can’t blame me for thinking you must have keeled over out there.”

Chris’s voice had gone husky and thick, and Warren was grateful he’d done it first, it gave him some kind of excuse for feeling his heart clench.

He reached over, cut through the ropes with his knife. Chris was weak and trembly when he stood, but he did stand on his own, pulling up his pants as he came up.

“Can you walk?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

So they got the fuck out of the barn, because one burning building was enough for one night. Warren considered Joe, still screaming down bloody murder over his bloody hands and knee, and dragged him out with them.

Chris turned and looked at him once they were out in the snow. He reached out and touched Warren’s face with his hand—left hand, Warren noticed at once.

“I did think you were dead. And I wanted to kill those fuckers so badly for what they done to you,” Chris whispered, voice tight and filled with a kind of awestruck wonder, like he was afraid Warren'd vanish in the moonlight if he looked away. 

Warren found himself cradling Chris’s right hand in his, without quite remembering taking it, seeing up close how badly all four of his fingers had been broken—that turned Warren’s thoughts back to Joe, back to the violence so near to his heart. 

But first, he brushed his thumb over Chris’s face, and Chris turned into it, letting Warren’s thumb smear his blood as he turned his face. Chris met his eyes and he pointedly turned his head a few more time against his thumb, like he needed to turn his own blood into another way Warren'd marked him.

Warren ran his other hand through Chris's hair, and it kind of stung like a motherfucker but that was all right, because at least they could feel something. He wasn’t frostbit. He could feel that thinning hair under his fingers, snowflakes catching in it.

After a minute of that, Warren distantly became again of screaming, bleeding Joe, who’d begun shouting some shit that didn’t make him any more warmly inclined toward him.

“I left this one alive for you. You think you can hold a knife?”

Chris’s bloody lips cracked into a grin. “Oh, you know I can.”

So Chris took the knife in his left hand, and even working with his weaker hand, he did some things that spoke to a certain talent and skill that had finally found its proper canvas. It warmed both their hearts and afterward, Mannix dropped the knife and put his hands on Warren’s beard, one broken and one bloody with Joe's blood, and held his face in his hands, like he was still checking him to make sure he was alive.

The fire didn’t seem at any risk of spreading to the farmhouse, and they were freezing, so they went indoors. It took a while, splinting up Chris’s fingers, but Warren did it. It was nice to know Chris still had some use to him even just with his left hand, but all the same, Warren’d prefer him with both his hands functional if he could manage it. “If I’m gonna have a sheriff in my pocket, I want him able to shoot a gun. And if I’m going to have a white boy living on his knees for me, I want him whole enough to use his hands on me as well as his mouth.”

“In your pocket, my ass,” Chris said, but he didn’t deny any of the rest of it. When his hand was splinted up, and the rest of his injuries bandaged as best as Warren could manage, Chris started going over Warren’s hands, brows knit together like he thought he was a fucking doctor.

“They’re all right,” Warren said. Chris nodded, but folded Warren’s hands between his good hand and his chest, like he was holding them close for safekeeping. They were both tired enough to to think that seemed almost normal, and when they collapsed on the bed, and Chris wrapped himself around Warren’s body.

Chris shivered beside him. “Should have known you’d only be bothered to step in when my balls were threatened.”

Warren laughed. “You must be mistaken, Chris Mannix. They could take them and your cock too and I’d still have no shortage of ways to entertain myself with you.”

“Well then I guess you just stepped in out of the goodness of your heart, is that it?” muttered Chris. Warren kept getting distracted, staring at him.

“I can’t think why I did it now.”

Chris sighed, sounding petulant. “I’d rather just sleep tonight, work out later how you’re going to try to spin me holding up under torture for you into something you can insult me about.”

“It ain’t my fault there’s so many things wrong with you.” Warren slipped a hand around behind him, slid his still-aching fingers in Chris’s mouth and let Chris suck on them obediently, warming them up, eyes fluttering closed like it was his dearest wish to imagine that wasn’t all he was sucking on.

When Chris had had enough of sucking on them, he tucked Warren’s hands between his legs. Warren thought at first he was somehow feeling frisky, but he just held them there, letting the heat of his thighs warm Warren’s hands.

“You can stay with me a spell, at least till your house is rebuilt,” Chris offered, looking away.

“You forgot I got twenty thousand in bounties buried up in the hills. I think I’ll be able to afford my own hotel room.”

Chris sighed, sounding huffy. “Meanwhile, I’ll be lucky I ain’t out of a job, my hand the way it is.”

“Red Rock waited for you to heal up when you got your ass shot up at Minnie’s, so I’m thinking they’ll be fool enough to wait for you on this.”

He watched the snow fall outside the window, heart still pounding and struggling to relax. He had the instinct to take Chris, to hold him down and fuck him, to fully reassure himself Chris was still whole and alive and Warren’s down to every last bruise. That’d have to wait for tomorrow, though, when they weren’t half-dead from pain and exhaustion.

“If they do toss you out on your ass, though—”

“Thanks for your confidence, you bastard,” Chris said.

“—I was going to say, if they do, I may need someone to help me rebuild my house, if building ain’t beneath you.”

“Really?” said Chris, sounding eager, shy, almost. 

Warren twitched his fingers between Chris's thighs, finding the bullet scar, and stroked him there. Amused, that the thought of being put to work by Warren made him react like he'd been offered a free blowjob. He could have said something about all the irony in that. Though he supposed it was no more ironic than everything else about this. “Yeah.”

“I’ll be there,” said Chris.


End file.
